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The Wisconsin DNR has released early findings regarding how CWD can influence overall deer populations and specific survival rates of infected deer compared to non-infected animals inhabiting the same regions.

In January 2017, the Office of Applied Science began a comprehensive study of deer mortality in southwestern Wisconsin as part of the Governor’s Initiative on Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). In this article, we report the results of our first year of monitoring deer survival. Since these are early results, we’re going to focus on broad differences between CWD positive and negative deer. We’ll report the percentage of deer that survived over the course of the year and how that differed between CWD-infected deer and uninfected deer. We’ll also break down the causes of mortality. More focused analysis, including sex, age and geographic differences will become possible as we gather more data.

The study hopes to shed light on how CWD might affect deer mortality rates overall. Looking beyond the animals who perish from obvious CWD symptoms. Initial data is showing that CWD infected animals are statistically more apt to die from a variety of reasons when compared to the non-infected herd, but the data is still too new to draw any solid conclusions.

Despite this level of uncertainty, the estimated survival rates are already significantly different from each other by statistical standards. Therefore, we can now say with confidence that the survival rate of CWD positive deer is lower than for negative animals, which was expected.